The unintelligent design case was lies, all lies

Some guy at the counter was offering his opinion. He didn’t weigh in on unintelligent design or the school board. Rather, he was angry at the judge.

That judge, he said, didn’t have to go and call those people liars. He believed that the judge overstepped his bounds, saying former school board members Alan Bonsell and William Buckingham, among others, repeatedly lied under oath.

What was that phrase the judge used? “Flagrant and insulting falsehoods.� That’s it.

Anyway, the guy said that was out of line and that the judge never proved that the school board members lied.

Um, hate to break this to you, pal, but he did — and it wasn’t very difficult.

Consider the case of Buckingham. He testified that he never mentioned creationism. Then, the plaintiff’s lawyers showed a videotape of an interview he gave Fox 43 that showed him mentioning — surprise! — creationism.

And Bonsell, well, at the conclusion of his testimony, the judge practically accused him of lying. To his face.

The reality was no one had to prove these guys were lying. It was self-evident. Their lies were so incredibly weak that you almost felt sorry for them, that their intellect and imaginations were so limited that they couldn’t come up with even moderately plausible untruths.

The judge had no choice. These clowns came into his courtroom and swore before God and everybody to tell the truth and then lied their butts off — and Jones is supposed to ignore it?

How could the judge ignore the lies? The entire case for unintelligent design was based on lies. Big lies. Small lies. Lies by omission. Lies by commission. Distortions. Fabrications. Just plain old — what’s that phrase again? — “flagrant and insulting falsehoods.�
Let’s start with the disingenuous peddlers of unintelligent design.

Their entire premise is built on deception. They say their notion is science, but for it to be considered science, one of its leading intellectual lights, Michael Behe, testified, you’d have to change the definition of science to one that would include astrology.

It’s not a pseudoscience. Calling it that does a great disservice to other pseudosciences — astrology, phrenology, low-carb diets. It’s non-science, or as biologist, textbook author and all-around good guy Ken Miller put it, it’s an anti-science.

Behe’s great claim is that some biological systems are what he calls “irreducibly complex.� But it turns out, he’s wrong about that. He also claims that there is no evidence of the evolution of the immune system, which, again, is just flat-out wrong. Behe had claimed that science could never find an evolutionary explanation of the immune system. Shown 58 peer-reviewed articles, nine books and a handful of immunology textbooks containing chapters on the evolution of the immune system, did Behe back down?

He said, nope, that’s not good enough.

And that brings us to one of the central themes of the trial and, well, the world we’re living in.

How can a person who is considered to be reasonably intelligent, or at least have enough fully operational synapses to maintain basic life functions, survive living in such a state of denial?

It’s as if, as a colleague said, a person is in a building that’s engulfed in flames and is not convinced that the house is on fire.

Today, Behe is standing in the ashes that were once his house and is still denying there was ever a fire. He still clings to his little concept — which boils down to the idea that all that stuff inside living things sure is complicated — despite the complete and total evisceration of the notion in a court of law.

The judge’s decision laid bare the big lie that unintelligent design has nothing to do with creationism.

That’s all it is, the judge said, creationism repackaged in an attempt to get around court prohibitions on teaching religious ideas in public schools. All the unintelligent design people did was substitute the word “creationism� with the phrase “intelligent design� in a ham-handed attempt at fooling a federal judge.

It didn’t work.

They ran into one, small problem.

Jones knows bullflop when he sees it.

Speaking of denial, the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based cult that pushes unintelligent design, issued a press release that called Jones an “activist judge� with “delusions of grandeur.�

First off, an activist judge, by this definition, is apparently a judge who issues a decision you disagree with. If Jones really were an activist judge, he would have ignored the overwhelming evidence and, substituting personal belief for logic and law, ruled in favor of the school board. He is the opposite of an activist judge. If you read his ruling, it’s clear he was guided by the law and the facts. Period.

And as far as Jones having “delusions of grandeur,� I personally don’t know the judge, but I did read that he is a Philadelphia Eagles fan.

I can say, from personal experience, that Eagles fans hold no delusions about anything. Â?

Mike Argento, whose column appears Mondays and Thursdays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints, can be reached at 771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.